Automated Preboarding: Ramping Up New Joiners at Ubique Group

How amazing would it be if your onboarding process ran itself – freeing HR from manual tasks, ensuring every new hire feels welcomed, and giving managers more time to focus on their team?

At Ubique Group, that’s the journey they’ve created with Enboarder. It’s one of the reasons they won Best Onboarding Journey in our annual JOY Awards. Ubique’s onboarding workflow connects 10+ stakeholders across four departments, turning a highly manual process into a seamless, automated experience.

Read our Q&A with Virginia Hudson, devops engineer at Ubique Group, to learn how they transformed their onboarding journey, reduced stress for HR, and set up new hires for success from day one.

Tell us about your role and Ubique Group.

I lead devops engineering at Ubique, one of the largest retail furnishers in the country. We sell through major players like Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and many others, so my job involves making sure our processes work seamlessly.

I focus on bringing teams, departments, and companies together, improving processes, prioritizing organization and efficiency, and turning complex tech talk into language that everyone – from engineers to marketers – can understand. I serve as the primary Enboarder admin at our company.

What were the goals of your Enboarder workflow?

Enboarder is in every different process that we have at this point it feels like! But the one that we submitted for the JOY Awards was our onboarding journey.

Before we started using Enboarder, onboarding was a very inconsistent process and experience. There was a lot of manual mental effort required. There were a couple of people in HR who had to remember every step for every new hire and onboard people manually, so everybody got a slightly different experience and it was a huge burden for the HR team (and other departments) to have to juggle all of that among their other tasks.

Consistency was another big goal. We want onboarding to be the same for every single person, rather than something inconsistent, stressful, and reactive, like it used to be.

Now it’s this proactive, welcoming, consistent, great experience for each and every new employee!

Who is interacting the most with your journey and why?

Whenever we look at who’s interacting with these modules and sequences the most internally, definitely some new people leaders who maybe haven’t been in a leadership position for that long – the integrated leadership trainings are a great resource for them.

But also people who have been here for a very long time in a high-level position with a lot of direct reports. They think it’s great for the same reason. They’re like, ‘It’s just handed to me. I don’t have to think about it. I can get a refresher on these skills whenever I want.’ Management loves that about our onboarding process!

Our workflow coordinates with IT to make sure that all of the new hire’s equipment arrives on time, asking them about a current updated address. We’ve had a couple of disasters before where a new employee didn’t update their address and that equipment was just lost, so having that all worked out ahead of time really smooths out the whole process for everybody.

And for HR as well. Things like sending out welcoming boxes, making sure compliance trainings are administered – they don’t have to think about that anymore. They were doing a lot of mental juggling before. So that’s usually what we hear the most positive feedback about from that team.

The workflow makes their jobs so much easier and it’s making all of the new hires feel really welcomed from day one.

How is Enboarder helping save time for HR and managers?

The managers definitely because they’re getting those skills as a people leader refreshed all the time. It just removes a lot of the memory work of trying to make sure you provide that consistent, warm, inviting experience.

And then, certainly new hires with making sure they are oriented ahead of time. They already know everything about our company – they know our values; they know the org chart; they can look through their Connection Cards and see who they’re working with. They come in with such a head start that saves a ton of time, and they feel more comfortable and confident on day one.

One manager said, ‘I used to have to spend a week just doing all of that myself instead of having all of the support.’ And now all of that’s done ahead of time, with additional content that’s scheduled over the first six months.

It’s also saving them time by prompting those conversations with the employee like, ‘What’s your working style? How do you prefer to be managed?’ It’s better to go ahead and have that out in the open ahead of time.

How are you measuring the success of your onboarding journey?

We’ll survey the manager to see how they feel the employee was prepared. For example, ‘On day one, did it seem like they had a good understanding of their job responsibilities?’ We also ask the employee, ‘How was your onboarding experience? How was your orientation experience?’

Since we began, we see a 4.9 on the employee side and a 5 on the manager side across the board. We’ve had consistently really good feedback, especially when compared to the lack of process beforehand.

Everybody seems to feel much more comfortable and prepared. And that’s a big thing for us. We don’t want somebody to come in and feel nervous and underprepared, we want them to know exactly what to expect: This is who you’re going to meet and when and this is what you should think about if you’re remote, if you’re in person, etc.

What’s next for Ubique Group?

Later this year we’re going to officially move over to Enboarder for performance management – in conjunction with our other HR software platforms, of course – but using Enboarder to get input from our users is something that everybody wants and something that the HR team is pushing for.

We actually did a one-sequence performance management test run with the company late last year just to feel things out, and the response was a resounding ‘YES, we like this better than the old process!’ They already expect the emails from Enboarder and enjoy interacting with the platform, so this will be a great fit for us.

Any advice for making onboarding more effective?

Anything that you can automate for people, they’re going to really appreciate and that’s going to instantly earn you a ton of buy-in to the program. Show them what’s in it for them – show them that it’s great for everybody! As for new hires, giving them as much information and support before day one as possible is essential. Share with them about your company, its values and goals, their new co-workers, different departments, etc. Let’s skip the ‘where’s the coffee maker?’ phase of onboarding and get right into being comfortable, confident, and productive!